The life-altering applications of nanoparticles are limitless—from drug delivery andenvironmental clean-up to a fresh water delivery system.Nanopar ticlesto the Rescue

Nanoparticles are between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. Scientists can harness them
for drug delivery, to combat disease
for filtering fresh drinking water, and
much more.

Now, researchers from MIT and
the Federal University of Goias in
Brazil have developed a new technique that uses ultraviolet (UV) light
to extract man-made pollutants from
soil and water.

These pollutants, including pesticides and endocrine disruptors like
bisphenol A, fight hard against natural degradation and disrupt systems
in mammals and other animals. With
the help of nanoparticles and UV
light, removal of these toxins could
be less expensive and time-consuming than current methods.

Lead author Nicolas Bertrand,
a former professor at MIT’s Koch
Institute for Integrative Cancer
Research, told LabOutlook that he
and colleagues stumbled upon the
idea of using UV light while they
were initially designing photo-sen-sitive polymers for drug delivery
applications. Once they came up
with a polymer that responded to
UV light, they realized that this did
not permeate well through skin and